Billy Paul

Billy Paul in 2005

Billy Paul, the singer, who has died aged 81, was best known for Me and Mrs Jones (1972), the sultry and heart-rending “Philadelphia Soul” love song which describes the pangs of a man having an extra-marital affair; the track was Paul’s only No 1, but his achingly smooth and faintly lisping rendition has endured for decades.

He was born Paul Williams in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 1 1934. His childhood was steeped in music and his naturally high voice and adaptable vocal range meant that he had a particular affinity for female soul and jazz singers. “They just did more with their voices,” he later explained, “and that’s why I paid more attention to them.”

Educated at the West Philadelphia Music School and the Granoff School of Music, by the time Paul was 16 he was performing at the ritzy West Philadelphia jazz hotspot Club Harlem, where he appeared on the same bill as Charlie Parker, a year before Parker’s death.

After changing his name to Billy Paul, he was soon being booked for regular club appearances and concert performances on the Philadelphia music scene. In 1952 he recorded his first single, Why Am I, in New York, described by Billboard magazine as the “expressive warbling of a moody ballad, by the label’s new 16-year-old chanter”.

Paul recorded several more discs before being drafted, in 1957, into the US Army, where he served alongside Elvis Presley in Germany and performed with the 7th Army Band. In 1959, after being discharged, he returned to the music scene and had a spell in the ever-changing line-up of Harold Melvin’s popular Philadelphia soul group, the Blue Notes. During this time, Paul met and befriended Marvin Gaye, who was also working as a jobbing singer with the emerging soul groups.

Billy Paul on stage in 1977               

In the late 1960s Paul and his wife (also his manager), Blanche Williams, were approached by Kenny Gamble, who, with his songwriting and producing partner, Leon Huff, would go on to create the Philadelphia soul sound for their label, Philadelphia International Records (PIR). Gamble signed Paul to his label and in 1968 he released his first album, Feelin’ Good at the Cadillac Club, although it was not a commercial success. With Gamble & Huff’s formation of PIR, however, Paul found himself joining a family of new acts who combined soul and jazz with funky dance grooves.

In 1972 he released the album 360 Degrees of Billy Paul, on which he had included Me and Mrs Jones. The yearning lyrics of the song – which was written by Gamble and Huff with Cary Gilbert, and has since been covered by artists ranging from Michael Bublé to the actress Sandra Bernhard – were brought to life by Paul’s effortless and occasionally soaring vocals: “Me and Mrs Jones, we got a thing going on/We both know that it’s wrong/But it’s much too strong to let it cool down now.”

It became the torch song for adulterous spouses and Paul’s  sensuous crescendo (“Me and Mrs Mrs Jones, Mrs Jones Mrs Jones Mrs Jones…”) captured perfectly the bitter-sweet pain of illicit love.

The song reached No 1 in the US charts in 1972 and was a British Top 20 hit the following year. It sold two million copies and went on to win Paul a Grammy Award.

It was also the first No 1 for PIR, and it was expected that Paul would soon release another smoochy soul classic. It was, therefore, somewhat surprising to Paul (and the mainstream fans of Me and Mrs Jones) when he followed it up with Am I Black Enough for You?

The song, described by one critic as “a social message moved along by a perky bongo and clavinet-dominated beat, and well-spaced, brassy horn hits” failed to achieve the crossover success of Mrs Jones and was later adopted by the Black Power movement. Paul himself revealed that he had not wanted to release the single. “But the company felt I had to get over to the black audience this time round,” he recalled in 1973. “And there can be no arguing about that – the record is one of the top sellers in the black areas and one of the most requested records around the stations. I don’t really think anybody expected it to be a pop hit.”

 Commercially it proved difficult for Paul to recover from such an overtly political track, and although he continued to release a number of critically acclaimed and popular discs, he never achieved the recognition or mainstream fame of some of his contemporaries. His single, Let’s Make a Baby (1976), also attracted controversy, although this time because of lyrics which were regarded as too explicitly sexual: “Come on, come on, let’s make a baby/Oh, baby, come on, come on/Let’s bring another life into this world.” Some American radio stations tried to ban the song, while one chose to play it, but not announce its title.

In 1977 Paul recorded a version of Paul McCartney’s Wings song Let ’Em In, changing the lyrics to include a list of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. That same year he joined Lou Rawls, Archie Bell, Teddy Pendergrass, Dee Dee Sharp Gamble, and Eddie Levert and Walter Williams  as part of the Philadelphia International All-Stars singing the outrageously groovy Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto.

 Billy Paul continued to record in the late 1970s and 1980s and, despite announcing his retirement in 1989, was playing at small venues and festivals into his seventies. In 2009, he was the subject of a documentary, Am I Black Enough for You?, in which it was revealed that he had had a spell as a cocaine addict, before recovering with the help of his wife. The couple were described as coming across as “a jazzy Derby and Joan.”

Paul is survived by his wife, Blanche, with whom he had two children.

Billy Paul, born December 1 1934, died April 24 2016

Prince

Prince in 1987 

Prince, who has died aged 57, was to the pop music of the 1980s what David Bowie had been to that of the previous decade, its sole authentic genius.

Certainly, there were singers who sold more records or gained more awards, although his sales would top 100 million and he won seven Grammys as well as an Oscar. There were contemporaries of his who dominated their genres of music to a greater extent, among them Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and Madonna. Yet none had as much influence or creativity as he, none broke as many rules as he, nor did so with such effortlessness and such showmanship.

• Neil McCormick on Prince's death: 'It's hard to accept we'll never see him on stage again'
• Albums such as Purple Rain and Sign O’The Times, and singles which included When Doves Cry, Kiss and Let’s Go Crazy made him a superstar. As astonishing as the often operatic intensity of the music was his versatility, for he often played most of the instruments himself.

Prince at the time of his musical film Under the Cherry Moon (1986) 

He was also a writer of songs for others, notably with Manic Monday for The Bangles and Nothing Compares 2 U, with which Sinead O’Connor had a worldwide hit. His live performances, with the petite Prince – he only stood 5ft 2in and often wore high-heeled boots – writhing, preening and out-dancing James Brown were theatre in little need of Viagra for all concerned to enjoy themselves.

There were of course familiar elements to this success. Sex and religion featured heavily in his musical repertoire, and he deliberately cultivated a mystique by avoiding giving interviews. But what was original to him was his irresistible fusion of black and white music – “technofunk”, fusing funk with synthpop, soul with rock – and his harnessing of dance beats to serious themes like nuclear war and Aids.

Lovesexy by Prince (1988) 

Not for nothing was the best of his backing bands called The Revolution. Prince’s fusing of white and black pop idioms, with its sheer elan and originality, managed successfully to surmount racial barriers in the highly conservative American rock industry of the 1970s.

Prince Nelson Rogers was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 7 1958. He would later distort the facts of his early life, dropping years from his age and claiming to be from a multi-racial family. In fact both his parents were African-Americans.

His father John Nelson was a pianist and the leader of the Prince Rogers jazz trio, after which the boy was named. “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do,” said his father. His mother Mattie, who was 16 years her husband’s junior, was the band’s singer. The couple divorced, however, when Prince was 10 and thereafter he was shuttled between the homes of relatives.

It was a peripatetic and unstable upbringing. “I was constantly running from family to family,” he recalled. “It was nice because I always had a new family. But I didn’t like being shuffled around.” But he always got on with his father. “My mom’s the wild side of me; she’s like that all the time,” he said. “My dad’s real serene; it takes the music to get him going. My father and me, we’re one and the same.” Prince wrote his first song when he was seven, and would go on to write thousands more, many of them never released and kept in the vaults of his recording complex, Paisley Park. He was a brooding young man. “I dealt in fantasy a lot back then,” he recalled.

He released his first album at 20, and steadily built a following over the next few years with records such as Dirty Mind (1980) and 1999 (1982). If these set a template for his music with their explicit lyrics and combination of musical styles, they also demonstrated how prolific he could be, often releasing an album a year.

“I think I say it exactly the way it is,” he said in 1981. “My albums deal with being loved and accepted. They deal with war. They deal with sex. When a girl can get birth control pills at age 12, she knows just about as much as I do.”

As a live performer, he was considered among the most thrilling in the business, a wonderboy of new-wave funk and weird eroticism who delighted both audiences and critics. A Newsweek review in 1981 enthused: “He pantomimes making love, he hands out money to the crowd… He bumps and grinds, he does a striptease… But when he’s on… there’s simply no one better.”

Prince on stage in the early 2000s 

His breakthrough came in 1984 with Purple Rain, the Oscar-winning soundtrack to the loosely biographical film of that name in which he starred and which became an unexpected success. Albums such as Around the World in a Day and Parade consolidated his star in the mid-1980s, but it was the double LP Sign O’The Times in 1987 which proved his music could have depth as well as sex appeal.

That was perhaps his peak, as thereafter he became embroiled in contractual disputes with his record label, Warner Bros. In 1993, he changed his name to that of a male-female symbol and scrawled “Slave” on his cheek. Once free of his contract, he reverted to his given name in 2000. By then, music had moved on but his impact remained lasting.

Prince performing with Beyonce at the Grammy Awards in 2004

His final studio albums were released last year, HITnRUN Phase One  and HITnRUN Phase Two. In middle age he embraced the Jehovah’s Witnesses and – although he had always had an oddly puritanical streak – his new-found piety decisively tempered some of the sexual explicitness of his act.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph’s Mick Brown in 2004 about his public image as a disturbed eccentric, he said: “The epiphany is where you see God, where you live at the level humanity is. You don’t let money, fame, the illusion rule you.”

He added: “God draws you out. You seek him or you don’t. You’ll hear his voice or you won’t. You’ll do what he asks you to do, or you won’t.”

Prince was twice married and divorced; his only child, a son, died soon after birth.

Prince, born June 7 1958, died April 21 2016

Victoria Wood

Victoria Wood receiving her CBE at Buckingham Palace in 2008

Victoria Wood, who has died of cancer aged 62,  found success in the 1970s as one of Britain’s first woman stand-up comics and the plump chanteuse of bittersweet songs, often with a social point.

At the heart of her acerbic observations on human frailty lay her mischievous brand of witty musical epigrams that conjured a lost 1950s world of feeble men, gynaecological afflictions, split ends, corner shops and unsatisfactory sex.

In the days when almost all stand-up comedians were men spouting sexist, racist material, Victoria Wood counted herself fortunate that she narrowly predated the wave of alternative comedians. Indeed, seated breezily at the piano,  she seemed to frame her essentially Northern, self-deprecating view of life in the  old-fashioned cabaret style of Noël Coward.

“She manages to be extraordinarily ordinary”

It was perhaps in subconscious homage to Coward (who had fashioned his own version of the Cole Porter standard in the 1950s) that she wrote her most popular number Let’s Do It, putting her own twist on it by making it a marathon saga of inverted suburban lust with the wife, Freda, wanting sex and the husband, Barry, finding every excuse not to oblige.

As Freda’s demands are given full rein (“Bend me over backwards on my Hostess trolley… Beat me on the bottom with my Woman’s Weekly”), Barry’s excuses become more and more lame (“You know I pulled a muscle when I did that grouting… ”)

Having surfaced on the ITV talent show New Faces in 1974, Victoria Wood soon became a fixture on Esther Rantzen’s BBC One That’s Life show, warbling whimsical takes on stories in the news.

Although Victoria Wood herself cultivated a deliberately frumpy, roly-poly image, attracting such epithets as The Daily Telegraph’s “plucky, buxom singing blonde from Lancashire”, her origins were comfortably middle-class: her father was an insurance underwriter who played jazz piano and wrote plays and television scripts in his spare time. Her flair was to capture the speech-patterns of ordinary folk discussing subjects that were workaday but inherently amusing. As one television producer put it, “she manages to be extraordinarily ordinary”.

An Audience with Victoria Wood, 1985 

 While her on-stage persona suggested the matey, if mumsy, girl-next-door, she earned a reputation for being  somewhat dour in private. She disliked publicity, was wary of journalists and gave interviews only when they served to promote her work. There were hints of a troubled childhood, and in the 1990s she underwent psychotherapy “to clear out things that might have been bothering me from my past”, although these were never specified.

“Untrammelled by political correctness, Victoria Wood’s scripts fizzed with sexual banter”

Her appearance, too, was ambiguous: the baggy striped blazer, trousers, carelessly knotted tie and pudding-basin haircut underlined a camp style that attracted a large gay following. Later, when Victoria Wood lost weight, she shed the boyish uniform for more stylish jackets and brooches. At the same time, she moved from one-liners to longer formats.

Her first substantial success on television was with her series Wood and Walters (1982), starring with her close friend from drama school days, Julie Walters. In Victoria Wood – as Seen on TV (1985), she created a cult classic with “Acorn Antiques”, a soap opera parody in which the cast, featuring Wood and Walters, fluffed their lines on the wobbly set, a throwback to the days of Crossroads. Victoria Wood’s scripts were clever, quirky and original, and the show won Bafta’s prize for best comedy of the year, cementing her claim to be the funniest woman in Britain.

After a gap of several years, in 1998 she returned to the small screen with a new sitcom, Dinnerladies, about a group of women working in a northern factory canteen.

Victoria Wood (centre) in Dinnerladies

Untrammelled by political correctness, Victoria Wood’s scripts fizzed with sexual banter between the women and the canteen manager, Tony (Andrew Dunn). “Abuse and harassment are disgusting,” she conceded, “but when people go to work they talk about sex - it’s part of life.” The series was recommissioned the following year, but received mixed reviews and was subsequently dropped.

She turned again to the live stage, touring provincial venues and starring at the London Palladium and at the Royal Albert Hall, where with her stand-up show, Victoria Wood — At It Again, she held the record for the most sell-out shows for a solo performer.

Victoria Wood was born on May 19 1953 at Prestwich, north Manchester, the youngest of four children. Her father worked in insurance, underwriting cover for pharmaceutical chemists, and as the Liberal agent for Bury and Radcliffe, where he and his wife brought up the family.

When Victoria was five, they moved to Birtle Edge House, a dismal, isolated former children’s home overlooking moorland on the outskirts of Bury.

A year later Victoria saw the comedienne Joyce Grenfell on stage in Buxton, and decided she wanted to be an entertainer.

At Bury Grammar School for Girls she was talented but withdrawn and lazy, and in her spare time joined the local orchestra and played trumpet in a military band.

Tortured by low self-esteem, she also read voraciously, second-hand books that had either been acquired by her book-obsessed mother, a drama teacher and former communist, or stolen from Bury Library (in 1999, by then an established star, Victoria Wood sent the library £100 in cash and a letter of apology).

For her 15th birthday in 1968 her father gave her a piano, and in the same year she joined Rochdale Youth Theatre Workshop, where she impressed with her writing skills and comic invention. Called for an audition at Manchester Polytechnic’s school of theatre in 1970, she failed to secure a place but encountered Julie Walters for the first time.

Victoria Wood performing in 1974 

In 1971 she enrolled at Birmingham University to study Drama and Theatre Arts and while working as a part-time barmaid in a pub frequented by BBC producers was invited to a party where she played a few of her songs. The following day she auditioned at the BBC studio, Pebble Mill, and was given a spot on a local television programme about Midlands life. This led to another audition, and two appearances on the ITV talent show New Faces, one of which she won.

But a major breakthrough still eluded her, and she spent four years on the dole, often depressed, staying in bed for 14 hours at a stretch, eating too much tinned mince but also writing stage sketches, some of which became vehicles for her satirical songs.

In 1978 her first stage hit, In at the Death (Bush), was a revue about mortality. The Daily Telegraph found the songs “successfully blend a gallows humour with an unexpected touch of humanity”.

She followed up with Talent (ICA, 1979), a largely autobiographical take on a dreadful talent show in which she deployed jokes about such preoccupations as corsetry and “barmy” nuns.

While The Daily Telegraph considered this “crude and chattermagging”, The Sunday Telegraph’s critic disagreed, saying Victoria Wood’s talent was “as ample as her frame”.

For years she had agonised about her weight, having envied her two older sisters who were thin and, to her mind, more attractive. As a young woman of 15 stone, she suffered from a compulsive eating disorder, which she overcame and later incorporated into her stage act.

She became a vegetarian, gave up smoking, drinking and sugar, but subsequently admitted to secret bingeing sessions, isolating herself socially in the process.

“If you have an eating disorder then food replaces almost any need that you have,” she explained. “But you have to do it privately. Personally I don’t like being fat. The fact is that I was overweight, but I’m not now.” She trimmed down to a size 14.

An Audience With Victoria Wood  

After undergoing a hysterectomy in 2001, she took up marathon running and in 2004 made a hard-hitting documentary for BBC Television excoriating the diet industry. The following year a musical version of Acorn Antiques, starring Julie Walters and directed by Trevor Nunn, opened at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

She was irked when her 2009 television special, Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas, was moved (without reference to her) from the promised prime time Christmas Day slot to an inferior one the night before.

In 2011 she wrote and directed a musical, That Day We Sang, for the Manchester International Festival, about a middle-aged couple who find love after meeting on a television programme about a choir they both sang in 40 years previously.

The following year she wrote Loving Miss Hatto (BBC1), an “imagining” of the life of the concert pianist Joyce Hatto, who became famous late in life when unauthorised copies of recordings made by other pianists were released under her name – a fraud which only came to light after her death.

The following year she produced a documentary about the history of tea entitled Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup of Tea.

In the last three years she appeared in episodes of QI and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, and in  2015 took part in a celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off for Comic Relief, when she was crowned Star Baker in her episode. In December last year she co-starred with Timothy Spall in Sky television’s 3-part adaptation of Fungus the Bogeyman.

Her television work earned her many British Comedy and Bafta awards, including, in 2005, a tribute award and, in 2007, Bafta’s award for best actress and best single drama for Housewife, 49. She was the Variety Club’s BBC Personality of the Year for 1987.

She was appointed OBE in 1997 and advanced to CBE in 2008. She once beat the Queen Mother into second place to top a poll of “People You’d Most Like to Live Next Door To”.

Victoria Wood married, in 1980, Geoffrey Durham, the magician who entertained under the name The Great Soprendo. The marriage was dissolved more than 20 years later, and she is survived by their son and daughter.

Victoria Wood, born May 19 1953, died April 20 2016

Gareth Thomas - Actor

Gareth Thomas as astrophysicist Adam Brake in Children of the Stones (ITV, 1977)

Gareth Thomas, who has died aged 71, was a regular face on the television screens and a much respected stage actor, but he became best-known as Roj Blake, the title character in the BBC’s cult sci-fi television series Blake’s 7, which ran from 1978 to 1981.

Thomas appeared on stage in many productions, including Royal Shakespeare productions of Twelfth Night (as Orsino), Othello (as Cassio) and Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (as Matt Burke). He appeared in English Shakespeare Company productions of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. Other stage credits included King Lear, Educating Rita, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Crucible and Equus.

 On television he was Shem in the ITV sci-fi series Star Maidens (1976) and astrophysicist Adam Brake in the fantasy series Children of the Stones (ITV, 1977). He appeared in Torchwood and Coronation Street, and was Bafta-nominated for his performances in Stocker’s Copper, a 1972 BBC Play for Today set during a Cornish clay miners strike, and Morgan’s Boy (1984), a BBC drama in which he played a Welsh hill farmer whose teenage nephew from Manchester (Martyn Hesford) comes to live with him.

Morgan’s Boy was his favourite television role, but it was Blake’s 7 that won the bigger audiences.

Gareth Thomas (centre) as Roj Blake, with fellow intergalactic renegades Paul Darrow (left) and Michael Keating (right), in Blake's 7

The show was created by Terry Nation, creator of Doctor Who’s Daleks, who later described it as “The Dirty Dozen in space”. Set in the “third century of the second calendar”, the series depicted an Earth under the yoke of a totalitarian galactic federation which drugs its citizens into placid submission. Thomas’s character was the dissident leader of a motley crew of renegades, battling the authorities from the deck of the spacecraft Liberator.

Some derided the show as  ridiculous, but it was ahead of its time in characterisation and plot, and its unlikely heroes had dark histories and flawed personalities.

Blake’s 7 proved an instant success, attracting an audience of 10 million viewers. It became a cult classic, partly for its dystopian view of the future, and partly for its wobbly sets and shoestring-budget costumes and special effects. Even when the series ended, its memory was kept alive by fan clubs and conventions.

In fact Thomas, as the title character, only appeared in 28 of the show’s 52 episodes as, after two seasons, he told the producers he had had enough. As a result Blake was declared “Missing in Action” and his intergalactic crew spent the next two series looking for him – finding him in a finale which saw all the main characters killed.

Like many actors who become typecast, Thomas struggled for a while to get good parts, but he remained philosophical: “One episode of Blake’s 7 will have been seen by more people than all the Royal Shakespeare Company shows I’ve done put together. People stop me in the street and say, 'Oi, you know who you used to be don’t you?’ I always answer, 'yes and I still am’.”

Gareth Thomas was born on February 12 1945 in Wales, attended King’s School, Canterbury, and trained at Rada. In later life he recalled being accident-prone as a young actor. In his first professional theatre appearance, his big scene involved walking on stage and opening a door. The door came off its hinges and he had to walk off stage with it. During an early appearance in pantomime, as King Rat, he lost his tail mid-performance.

After making his television debut as Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet in 1965, in 1967 he appeared in Hammer Films' Quatermass and the Pit as the workman who discovers alien skeletons in the Underground.

“They built up this very expensive plaster of Paris tube station wall with real clay carefully put in and the alien skeleton set behind it,” he said. “The director told me to take a pickaxe and hit the top of the clay so that the whole section of wall would fall away. He suggested a rehearsal first, and warned me not to actually hit the thing. So I swung the pick, stopped it dead an inch from the wall ... and the head flew off and smashed the whole thing. There was a moment’s absolute silence broken only by the director yelling 'props’! It took three hours to rebuild.”

Gareth Thomas as Peter Graves  in the HTV drama To Each His Own (1991) 

Thomas’s other television credits included The Avengers, Z-Cars, Sutherland’s Law, Bergerac, Casualty, Taggart, Heartbeat and Midsomer Murders. On stage in 2010 he gave an acclaimed performance as Ephraim Cabot in Desire Under the Elms at the New Vic Theatre.

In 2012, he reprised his role as Blake in The Big Finish’s audio series Blake’s 7: The Liberator Chronicles. In 2013 he appeared as Brother Cadfael in Middle Ground Theatre Company’s adaption of The Virgin in the Ice by Ellis Peters.

He is survived by his wife, Linda, and a son; a daughter predeceased him.

Gareth Thomas, born February 12 1945, died April 13 2016

David Gest

David Gest with Liza Minnelli in 2003

David Gest, who has died aged 62, was a music producer, reality television star, childhood friend of Michael Jackson and martyr to plastic surgery; he was also the fourth husband of Liza Minnelli.

“In the annals of weird celebrity couplings, Liza Minnelli and David Gest are surely filed under E for Eek!” one commentator observed. It was the first wedding for the 48-year-old Gest, who had been introduced to the 56-year old actress by Jackson. “I am the happiest I’ve ever been,” his fiancée said. “Everything I’ve been through was worth it to find David.”

There were some raised eyebrows, not least because many had assumed that Gest was gay. He denied it, claiming he had “never been a friend of Dorothy” (a reference to Liza’s mother Judy Garland). Not everyone was convinced.

David Gest and Liza Minnelli after their wedding in 2002 

The much-hyped wedding, an over-the top affair, took place in New York on March 16 2002. Jackson served as best man, Elizabeth Taylor and Marisa Berenson as maids of honour, and the British actress Martine McCutcheon was one of 14 bridesmaids, aged between 26 and 78 – all dressed in black.

The 500-strong guest list included Anthony Hopkins, Michael and Kirk Douglas, Elton John, Gina Lollobrigida, Joan Collins, David Hasselhoff, Barbara Walters, Mia Farrow and Donald Trump. “There’s no VIP unturned, you know,” observed the gossip columnist Cindy Adams. “If they could get Mae West from the grave, they’d pick her up and stuff her and sit her in the third row.”

Proceedings did not go entirely to plan. A British Airways Concorde packed with celebrity guests had to abort take-off from Heathrow Airport after developing a technical fault; Whitney Houston, who was due to sing her 1980s hit The Greatest Love of All as a processional, pulled out, to be replaced by Natalie Cole singing Unforgettable.

The groom’s sunglasses, it was noted, remained in place throughout the ceremony.

The marriage lasted until July the following year when Gest sued Liza Minnelli for $10m, accusing her of being a violent alcoholic who had failed to tell him she carried the herpes virus. So serious were the injuries she had inflicted upon him during episodes of “spousal abuse”, he claimed, that he suffered from “throbbing pain, severe headaches, vertigo, nausea, hypertension, scalp tenderness and insomnia”. At the time of their marriage, his 11-page suit went on crushingly, Liza Minnelli “was an alcoholic, overweight [and] unable to be effectively merchandised”.

Liza Minnelli denied the claims and filed a counter-suit, claiming that he had stolen at least $2 million she had earned while performing in shows he produced. Both dropped the claims before finalising their divorce in 2007.

David Gest (left) and fellow celebrities on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here 

By this time Gest had embarked on a new career on British television as a contestant on ITV’s 2006 run of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. To begin with his chances did not look too promising. On the insurance form he filled out for the producers, he listed among his ailments vertigo, hypertension, scalp tenderness, insomnia, dysphoria, photosensitivity, recurrent vomiting, anorexia and shingles. He also claimed to suffer from chronic phonophobia – fear of the sound of his own voice.

His fellow “celebs” were dubious too: Cherie Blair’s half-sister, the writer Lauren Booth, described Gest as “even scarier than his pal Michael Jackson. I mean, I wish him well but he’s got an ironing board face. .. I’m really scared to be around someone who’s got tattooed eyebrows.” The comedienne Faith Brown said that Gest reminded her of a vampire: “Does he scare me? No, I wouldn’t say that. I’ll just take a string of garlic with me.”

Gest went in with odds of 50-to-one. But his efforts in the bushtucker trial, when viewers saw him, beset by all manner of creepy crawlies, calmly collect the six required tokens to emerge from the box with an enormous spider attached to his back, began to swing the odds in his favour. Meanwhile his celebrity name-dropping, his entertaining, if often unlikely, tales about Michael Jackson, and his range of imaginary characters, meant that he soon acquired an army of British fans. He eventually finished fourth.

“When I came out and saw all the clippings I was overwhelmed,” he recalled. “It was an amazing feeling to be loved… I never had love as a child so I feel very blessed.”

David Gest in 2006 

David Alan Gest was born on May 11 1953 in Los Angeles, and grew up in Southern California, where he became friends with his next-door neighbour Michael Jackson and his brothers. Like the Jackson children, he had a difficult childhood, enduring frequent beatings by his father, Jesse, a financier.

Unhappy with his looks, and inspired by Jackson’s example, in his late twenties Gest decided to do something to alter them: “Michael had had a little nose thinning done so I knew I could do something about my face,” he recalled later. “I went to his plastic surgeon Dr Steven Hoefflin to do something with my nose. All of a sudden I decided to have a nose job and facelift in one operation, and have cheek implants and a cleft chin in another a week later.” Nine years later he had a hair transplant.

David Gest in 2007 with his collection of showbusiness memorabilia 

By this time he had begun to forge a career as a music producer, working with, among others, Jackson, Ray Charles and Luther Vandross. He signed up stars such as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera and Shakira for concerts in Madison Square garden. In 2001 a tribute concert to Michael Jackson was watched by 44 million viewers.

His success on I’m a Celebrity led to Gest becoming a staple of British reality television and from then on he spent most of his time in Britain . He starred in his own ITV show, This is David Gest, showed up on Soapstar Superstar, and did stints as a guest judge on Simon Cowell’s Grease is the Word talent show and its sequel Greased Lightning. A memoir, Simply the Gest, was published in 2007.

David Gest arrives at the Celebrity Big Brother house on January 5 2016 

In January this year Gest was the favourite to win when he entered the Celebrity Big Brother house, and prospects were looking good when he went on a date with his tattooed fellow celebrity Jeremy McConnell, who turned up in drag as Gest’s ex-wife, and when Tiffany Pollard misheard the news about the death of David Bowie, thinking it was Gest who had died. The moment housemates ran into the bedroom and pulled back the covers to find Gest, recumbent but alive, made for shocking viewing.

In fact Gest, though not dead, was unwell, and on Day 13 he left for unexplained medical reasons. Before his death, he had been planning to capitalise on the incident by embarking on a tour of Britain with a show entitled David Gest Is Not Dead, But Alive With Soul.

David Gest, born May 11 1953, died April 12 2016